PUBLIC EDUCATION... WHAT WAS I THINKING? A REAL SCHOOL TEACHER SPILLS THE BEANS EtherZone.com By: Joe Blow (Not his real name) Did you ever have one of those dreams in which you go back to high school? I've had several of them over the years since I graduated from a small, private high school in the upper Midwest in 1973. Recently, I had another one of these dreams. Nothing very exciting, to be sure, but somewhat disconcerting nonetheless, now that I'm 46. Now I'm really back in high school, only this time I'm on the other side of the teacher's desk, at a public high school in California. My first high school only had 400 students, this one has 1500. The similarities end there. I can truthfully say that I'm learning a lot, especially about public education and what it produces. If you haven't been to high school in several decades, please allow me to bring you up to speed: It's changed, a lot. It bears no resemblance to my experience as a high school student. Here are a few examples: -- Big Brother is alive and well. We have mandatory photo IDs for students and an extensive closed circuit TV video monitoring system. The local police can monitor and control the system from their station a mile away. George Orwell would be proud. With this system you can zoom in and read a license plate from across campus, easily. -- Students are tested to death. In the months of March, April, and May they are subjected to numerous state mandated tests. This is a major time burner for many teachers and a scheduling nightmare for the administration. This year's crop of freshmen will also be subjected to the new California High School Exit Exam. To graduate, you must pass this test, eventually, no matter what. -- Many students have major reading problems. Why? Reading isn't taught after the fourth grade. If students aren't reading at grade level by then, good luck. Most of them will never catch up, but almost all of them will still graduate from high school. Is that scary or what? Not to worry though, that will soon change dramatically with the implementation of the High School Exit Exam. -- The curricula at my school resembles a Chinese menu. Pick several courses from columns A, B, or C. What ever happened to the basic core courses that everyone was required to take and pass? My school prides itself on being a "comprehensive" high school. In six years I've yet to figure out what that means, but I'm certain that it's not necessarily a good thing. -- In any given quarter, at least 60% of the students at my school are failing one or more classes. Many of them are failing several classes at once. The worst part is that there is no apparent stigma attached to failing grades, not a good sign. -- There are 16 categories of valid reasons why on any given day a particular student doesn't even have to come to class. I've found it very difficult to teach students who don't show up. Go figure. Is it just me, or what? -- Discipline is a joke. The consequence for most infractions is OCS, on campus suspension, which amounts to a study hall where students are required to copy the dictionary. Some days the OCS room is full, standing room only. The same faces appear there almost daily. OCS is regarded by many students as a social club, with a certain amount of status that comes with the territory. Most of these students will not be able to function in the real world, outside the plastic bubble of high school. At my first high school, we had no special education program. At my current high school, special education students are everywhere. In my department alone, 30% of our students are classified as special education. I'm not a special education teacher, and neither is another teacher in my department, yet one of his classes is 73% special education students. How can this be? We are general education teachers, yet somehow the issue of teaching special education students is never even addressed. Here's the kicker: Due to privacy rules, it is standard procedure for my school to not even tell the general education teacher who their special education students are, let alone what their particular problem is. It can take you weeks or months to finally discover that some of your students can barely read at all. Surprise! Sure, many of these students come from broken homes and worse, but it's also been my experience that there is little or no accountability in public school, mostly because state law won't allow it. You can't get there from here. Involved parents are also very rare. Failing students cycle through the system until they get expelled or transferred to the alternative school, where they become someone else's problem. Here's what I see every day at my public high school: -- Many students have no plan and no clue, even the seniors. The students that scare me the most are those that don't have a clue that they don't have a clue. They are not rare either. -- For many students, school is basically a social activity. They only come to school because that's where their friends are. -- Responsibility is a foreign concept to many students. Include morality, ethics, and right vs. wrong in that category. -- Good grades are largely seen as expectations of attendance. "Just give me the A" is the unstated sentiment. -- Good manners and simple common courtesy are ancient history. Rude, crude, and vulgar behavior is the order of the day. -- Homework is something that other people do, that way you have someone to copy from. Work ethic? "What's an ethic?" -- Cheating is common and regarded as normal by many students. "Everyone cheats," is the standard refrain. -- It's only wrong if you get caught. I found this out by conducting an experiment my first year. The contrived scenario involved murdering a fictional student bully. The students were guaranteed that there would be no witnesses and that they wouldn't get caught. All six of my classes came to the same conclusion: They would murder the student bully, in cold blood, no problem. -- A scholarship may be accepted if someone hands it to the student, but don't expect that student to do anything to get it, including filling out an application or licking a stamp. -- The typical high school student's idea of long term planning is, "What's for lunch?" Granted, this problem has been around forever, but it seems much more prevalent than I recall from my own past. If this is what the public school system produces, I want a much better alternative. The good news is that my high school is one of the better public high schools in the state. The bad news is that there are many public high schools in California that can't hold a candle to this one. So, what's the solution? There are those today in the fields of politics and education who offer vouchers as the way out of public education and its failing schools. As a Libertarian, I am hard pressed to endorse this proposal on principle, but there is another way of looking at this issue. I have decided to personally support vouchers, if there are no strings attached to the money, to allow parents to enroll their children in a private school. In taking this apparently inconsistent position I am taking the larger view, for a strategic purpose. It seems fairly obvious to me that many people will follow the money, but for different reasons. As private school enrollment grows due to vouchers that come with transferring students, the public schools will undergo a radical, painful transformation. Failing students with uninvolved parents will stay in public schools. Students who have involved parents and want to learn will escape to private schools, where most will flourish due to higher expectations, peer pressure, competition, and that great sense of accomplishment and pride that comes with success. Failing public schools will close. Some of them will merge with other public schools. As teaching jobs disappear from the public school system teachers will transfer to private schools, because that's where the jobs will be. Some of the best teachers will abandon public schools because they will finally be able to do what they love to do: actually teach students who are in school because they want to learn and succeed. It is the teacher's drug of choice, preferred above all others. If you were a public school teacher and given the two choices of teaching in a private school with high standards or staying behind to fill one of the relatively few remaining teaching positions in a failing public school full of marginal students, just how long would it take you to make up your mind? Eventually, the state will be forced to conclude that the ever rising per student cost of public education is prohibitive and that the bang for the taxpayers' buck is minimal, but that won't become evident until the massive failures of the High School Exit Exam start to occur in 2004. Then standby, because it's going to get bloody. Imagine yourself as the principal of any CA public high school, two weeks before graduation, as your phone rings off the hook with calls from angry parents. "What do you mean my son/daughter isn't going to graduate? He/she is going to XYZ College and already has a scholarship! How can he/she not graduate? What have you people been doing there for the past four years?" The state has already attempted to head off public school teacher flight by recently passing socialist legislation to make public school teachers a protected class, by giving them a Teacher Retention Credit on their state income taxes. Trust me, that $250 to $1500 credit won't keep teachers in public schools once "teaching to pass the test" becomes the order of the day. I expect that other state workers will soon be clamoring for protected status. Firefighters, police, and highway dept. workers instantly come to mind. Once enough protected classes exist in California, the unprotected will revolt, and the welfare state may finally collapse, taking public education with it. The sooner the better. I've spent four years as a student in a private high school and almost six years as a teacher in a public high school. This ain't rocket science. My three children are already in private school. Who has the vouchers? http://www.etherzone.com/2001/blow060701.shtml |